We weren’t living in an industrial, crime-ridden city of the 1980s like he had been when his parents were killed. Our house was smack-dab in the middle of one of the wealthiest counties in the nation. Kids walked to elementary school in our neighborhood. And middle school and high school too. They rode their Big Wheels down the sidewalks and tossed footballs in the streets. There were community movie nights and food truck festivals and bonfires in the park. If Sean had been looking for a safe place to raise Sam, he couldn’t have settled in a better area. But clearly, none of that had been enough. Sean had still been worried about something in the months before he died.
* * *
I was still trying to figure everything out when Jenn came to pick up Preston.
She looked beyond me into the house. “So where are the kiddos?”
“Playing Bad Guys.”
She sent me a quizzical look. “Bad Guys?” She raised her brow. “Do tell.”
How to put into words the unease that I felt? It wasn’t normal to teach your child the Bad Guys game. But Jenn had enough problems of her own. She didn’t need to add mine to them. “It was a Sean thing. He used to play it with Sam.” I shook my head. “But never mind. How did it go?”
“It’s not. Going.” She bit her lip. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to get residential custody.”
That was news to me. “What do you mean?”
“I’ll share custody, but you know my schedule. It’s crazy. Senator Rydel’s a great guy, but working for him will never be nine-to-five. And you know Mark. He’s all about being a dad. Since he’s got the more flexible schedule, what’s the judge going to say?”
As Jenn stood there recounting her meeting, I tried to sympathize in the right places. But my mind kept crunching the new pieces of data I’d discovered, trying to reconcile those glimpses of Sean with the man I’d once known.
Why hadn’t he told me about his fears? What other kinds of secrets might he have been keeping?
8
By evening, my unease had morphed into something bigger and darker. I may have banged my pots around as I washed them, and I might have slammed the doors to the cabinets as I put the dishes away. After the kitchen was clean and every spare crumb obliterated by antibacterial kitchen spray, I stood there wanting to do something. Solve something. Fix the disequilibrium that had been created.
Using my wrist, I pushed at the hair that had escaped both my ponytail and the confines of my headband.
I went into the dining room and ripped the placemats off the table. And then, as I stalked to the back door to go shake them outside, I nearly tripped over Alice. “Sorry.”
All the warmth of the afternoon had been lost to the autumn night. After I shook the mats clean, I took a deep breath of frost-laced air before going back inside. After throwing them back on the table, I returned to the kitchen. Squeezed out my sponge, put it back in its holder. Then I slapped my palm down on the countertop.
Alice was watching me, ears cocked.
“I’d been doing so well, don’t you think? Fixing the faucet. Cleaning out Sean’s desk.” I still hadn’t dropped his phone line from my account, but I would. Eventually. I’d called his voice mail almost every night that first month after he’d died. I’d just needed to hear his voice.
My mind had been so fuzzy back then. Without Sean, I’d just been going through the motions.
Then, a few months later, my synapses had begun to fire in fits and starts as I began to take notice of the world around me. As of that afternoon? I was fully engaged, my thoughts razor sharp and singed around the edges with frustration over all the unknowns that were cropping up in my world. “What am I supposed to do, Alice?”
She sighed and settled her chin on her paws.
“I wish I could talk to him about everything. Maybe there was some perfectly reasonable explanation.”
* * *
People always say you never forget your first. Well, that was Sean: my first, my only.
I hadn’t even been thinking about love the night we met at the Clarendon Ballroom.
I’d been thinking about black holes. Because, why not?
The concept of the black hole is a mystery made more enigmatic by a misnomer and more complex by competing theories.
Black hole is an oxymoron. They’re created by dying stars. And it’s not that black holes signify a giant nothingness, but rather a giant everything-ness. A black hole is the densest mass in the universe. They aren’t called black holes because they’re unfathomably deep, but because they’re unfathomably dense. And they just keep adding to their density.
There’s everything and the kitchen sink in there. There’s so much matter crammed into a black hole that nothing can get out. Not even light. That’s what makes them invisible.
That means black holes can only be studied by observing their effect on the matter around them. Millions of black holes exist undiscovered—in our galaxy alone—simply because nothing has passed by close enough for us to detect them.
The funny thing is, people talk about black holes all the time. Even when they don’t know they’re doing it. Everyone who wishes they could stop time? The only point at which time ever stands still is at the edge of a black hole. Just before mass tips over the “edge” and is drawn into one, time freezes. If people knew that’s what their time-stopping moment would be, they wouldn’t make that wish.
How many black holes are there?
One hundred million. A new one forms every second. There’s one at the center of our galaxy.
You’d think scientists would be able to figure out what happens to the things that get pulled inside black holes, but no one actually knows. Energy can’t be created or destroyed; we know that for certain. But inside a black hole, it can be honed and compacted down to a single, solitary point. Dump in the entire United States. Throw in Africa and Europe and Asia too. And in the end? They all get compressed down to a single point.
The paradox is mind-blowing.
And yet whatever is taking place inside of them must have some sort of process. Even if it defies description, it can’t defy explanation. If someone could just turn their brain inside out long enough to comprehend all the complexities, then physicists might be able to better explain the phenomenon.
Why couldn’t that person be me?
Jenn had long ago attached herself to a lawyer type wearing the newest pastel incarnation of preppy chinos. And I had long ago given up on meeting anyone other than a junior Capitol Hill staffer or congressional lobbyist.
So, black holes.
I brought out the topic the way other people pulled out a Sudoku or a crossword puzzle, hoping that time and experience might reveal a different way of looking at things. There was always the chance that a series of unrelated events or mindless daily tasks would provide the trail of crumbs that would lead to comprehension of the scientific mysteries of dark matter, dark energy, or the reversal of time.
And, possibly, a Nobel Prize.
I sighed and glanced out over the wall. The rooftop bar overlooked a bloated median in Clarendon that was meant to be a tree-lined oasis. It was home to an Orange Line metro stop, a fountain that burbled when it happened to feel like it, and an overlooked monument to those who had died in the last century’s wars. I was probably the only one who wished I were down there instead of up on the roof.
Everyone else was laughing and drinking. They were making a surprisingly persistent attempt at pretending the song the DJ was playing was danceable.
Poking my straw at the fruit that had settled to the bottom of my ruby-colored sangria, I wondered how long I should wait before I dragged Jenn away. She’d made me promise not to let her go home with anyone but me.
Thirty minutes? An hour?
I gave a piece of pineapple a good poke. As I eyed the steadily growing crowd and all the gyrating bodies, my gaze swept past a man at the bar. Came back to focus on him.
Dark-haired. Dark-eyed.
Hel-lo!
9
I caught a glimpse of his face and he shifted, attention caught by something to the left of me. I still had a few high school tricks up my sleeve, though; I moved left, threading my way around dancing couples, hoping it would place me in his view. And it did.
He saw me.
We saw each other and everything changed.
It was one of those movie moments. He pushed away from the bar and started toward me and suddenly time became elastic. The music faded and people moved in slow motion as I swallowed, wishing I’d actually worn the cute dress Jenn had convinced me to buy.
Then time slammed back into place—the music overloud, people overclose, my cheeks overheated. As he came toward me, I wished he’d stop looking at me. But then, just as quickly, I hoped he wouldn’t.
He nodded.
My mouth opened, but I don’t think I said anything.
What was it about his eyes? They were dark. Probing. But it was more than that. It was as if I was the one he’d been looking for.
The lock of gel-tipped hair that lifted from his widow’s peak? It only emphasized those gorgeous eyes. The tattoo on his bicep that played hide-and-seek with the sleeve of his polo? Intriguing. The fact that his jaw was outlined by a not-too-close shave? Magic. And yes, Robert De Niro, he was talking to me.
And he kept talking to me! (Honestly, that normally didn’t happen. I wasn’t very good at flirting.)
When he asked if I wanted to leave, I happily threw all my mother’s advice right out the window, as if I didn’t have a world-class brain.
Don’t ever let a stranger buy you a drink.
He wasn’t a stranger; his name was Sean.
Don’t ever leave a bar with someone you don’t know.
I did know him. His name was Sean.
Always go home with the friends you came with.
I would have, but Jenn had just given me a thumbs-up and disappeared with the guy in pastel chinos. And that left me with Sean.
When all else fails, take a taxi home with the spare twenty you keep in your wallet.
If I hadn’t spent that spare twenty, I might have. But again, there was Sean, who seemed more than happy to walk me home. It was odd, really. There’d been no one at all and then, all of a sudden, there was Sean.
I wasn’t drunk. I never got drunk. But I was buzzed and I was happy and when he offered to take me home, I accepted. Why? Because somewhere, deep down, I understood that I wouldn’t be able to keep feeling like the only girl in the world if he stopped looking at me.
* * *
Now I couldn’t even think of our first meeting without wondering if there was something I should have seen from that very first night. Was he a liar when I first met him? Was there something he’d been hiding even then?
You never know enough about a person when you first start dating to understand what they’re made of. They’re a black hole of sorts. You know they’re composed of a density of associations and people and experiences, but you can’t actually see any of that. You know everything about them reinforces a certain theme of their character. But you can’t see that either. Not at first. Not until you get closer. And by that time they have pulled you in past the point of no return and you’ve lost your objectivity. You’ve become part of their density, and when that happens you can no longer escape.
So I had questions without any good answers and no foreseeable way of finding any either. But it was clear that there was something, some things, about Sean that I hadn’t been able to see.
If it had just been the lie about the faucet, I might have gone into our room and rifled through his clothes—which, yes, were still there—looking for signs of lipstick or sniffing for the scent of an alien perfume. Or any perfume, really, because I didn’t wear any. Much to my mother’s chagrin.
But it wasn’t just the lie.
It was the idea that Sean thought Sam might be in danger.
Sean had worn a green beret. It’s not like he didn’t know what danger was. It might seem strange that I’d never asked him much about his time in service. Probably made me seem impossibly naïve, because that’s what pillow talk was for, wasn’t it? But I was raised in a military family by a four-star general. Any information I was given had been strictly on a need-to-know basis. And one of my family’s cardinal rules was Don’t Question What You’ve Been Told.
Over a million Americans hold top secret security clearances. Among them were probably many of my friends and neighbors. So in the DC area? You didn’t pry. People told you what they could. They might say what three-letter agency—Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Agriculture—they worked for, but that’s usually where the information stopped.
When Sean had told me that he’d “done stuff,” I’d left it at that because people with top secret security clearances honestly don’t even tell their wives what they do for a living. Not everything.
So, knowing Sean’s background and that he was worried about Sam’s safety? That was big news. That meant I should be worried too.
It led me to question my understanding of reality as I folded laundry that night.
In order to make sense of our unanswerable questions in physics, we scientists have begun to think we might have to jettison all of our assumptions and leave behind everything we know. The answers are staring at us—they are right in front of our eyes. Everyone knows they are; we just can’t see them because they’ve camouflaged themselves in our reality. The key to unlocking the mysteries has to be things we’ve seen a million times and always managed to overlook.
So that was the challenge. How could I unknow the Sean I’d married? How could I re-see the man I’d once known? I needed to look, not for clues, but for something obvious. Something, perhaps, that had been there the whole time.
10
It took longer than normal to get Sam to bed that night. His counselor told me it might take a while for Sam to let himself fall asleep again without a fight.
Subconsciously he was afraid I might die while he was sleeping too.
I called my parents and put them on speakerphone. Sometimes that worked. My father asked Sam about school. Asked me about work. I mentioned Mr. Hoffman had brought Sam another train. Sam sang a song he’d learned at school that included the names of all fifty states, in alphabetical order. Then he sang it again. They reminded him that they’d be coming into town again on Friday and would play with him. But when we said good night, Sam was still wide-awake.
We cuddled for a while on the couch as we stared up at the constellations of glow-in-the-dark stars I’d stuck to the living room ceiling. When he started nodding off, I carried him to bed.
But then I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about Sean.
I’d been looking back at the beginning of our relationship to try to figure out what I’d been missing. It hadn’t gotten me very far. I decided, as I lay in bed, that maybe I should start at the end, with the night Sean died. Maybe from there I’d be able to pick up something, some thread, that would unravel everything back to the beginning. It was the same way scientists observed explosions in the universe and then followed them back through billions of light-years to determine where they’d come from.
So I threw on a bathrobe and went into the office and pulled out the documents from the accident. The police report. The medical examiner’s report. The death certificate.
As I sat there on the cold wood floor in my pajamas, I read through the medical examiner’s report. The descriptions of the actual autopsy meant nothing to me. And I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for. Sean had died. End of story. But I skimmed the pages anyway. They stated his sex, height, weight. Eyes: brown. Hair color: black. Noted his tattoo, scars, moles. There were descriptions of the evidence of injuries. Next were pathological findings.
He’d been found in the driver’s seat. He had blunt-force injuries. One of his lungs had been punctured. I went on to the next page. There had been no video surveillance. No witnesses that they could find. The verdic
t? He’d died of blunt-force injuries to the head due to a motor vehicle accident.
It was signed and stamped by the medical examiner, Dr. Kyle Correy.
Attached to the report was an inventory of personal effects. The items he’d been wearing or carrying were listed on the left-hand side of the page. The right side noted that they’d been “given to father-in-law.” I’d asked my father to identify Sean on my behalf.
The inventory had been taken by the medical examiner as well.
I read through the list:
Black coat
Blue plaid shirt
Jeans
Brown leather wallet
Keys
Phone
White socks
Brown boots
Briefs
Watch
Gold wedding ring
Pocketknife
They were all still in the cardboard box my father had signed for. But what would it hurt to go through them again? I pulled the box from the corner of the closet where I’d let it gather dust and went down the list, pulling the items out as I came to them.
With every item came a whiff of that indefinable combination of soap, shampoo, and laundry detergent that had, when combined with the heat of his skin, resulted in a scent that was uniquely Sean.
I had to pause a couple of times, take a few deep breaths, but I got through it.
Everything was there but the pocketknife.
I turned the box upside down.
No knife.
I unfolded all the clothes, averting my eyes from the rust-colored bloodstains. Then I felt in the pockets of the jeans and coat to make sure it hadn’t been concealed inside.
Nothing.
I paged back through the report and made a note of the medical examiner’s name and phone number.
Had anything else failed to come back to me from the autopsy?
I grabbed his wallet and went through it.
Driver’s license. Library card. Visa. ATM card. Medical insurance card.
Nothing else.
State of Lies Page 4
